Harlan Coben: Stay close

Sarah Green moved toward the open ground with a rose in her hand. She tossed it down on the casket. Susie followed. Then Brandon. Broome didn’t move. Erin, looking beautiful in black, was in the row behind him. Her husband, Sean, stood next to her. Sean was a good man, truth be told. Broome turned toward Erin and met her eye. Erin gave him a small smile, and Broome felt that too-familiar pang in his chest.

The longing would always be there. He knew that. But Erin was gone to him. He needed to understand that.

The mourners began to disperse. Broome started to wander back to his car when a hand touched his shoulder. He turned to see Sarah.

“Thank you, Broome.”

“I’m so sorry,” he said.

Sarah shaded her eyes, squinting into the sunlight. “I know it sounds weird, but this really does give me closure.”

“I’m glad.”

“It’s time to move on, right?”

“Right.”

They stood there for a moment.

“Now that this case is over,” Sarah began, “will you still come by to see me?”

He wasn’t sure what to say. “I don’t know.”

“Because I’d like it if you did, Broome,” she said. “I’d like it very much.”

She walked away then. Broome watched her until she disappeared.

He thought about Lorraine and Del Flynn and Ray Levine and Megan Pierce and even Erin, who’d left him and left the job but never really left at all.

Maybe, Broome thought, Sarah was right. Maybe it was time for all of them to move on.

Fester dropped Ray off at the airport.

“Thanks, Fester,” Ray said.

“Ah, you’re not getting off that easy. Come here, you.”

Fester put the car in park and got out. He gave Ray a bear hug, and Ray, surprising himself, hugged Fester back.

Fester said, “You’ll be careful, right?”

“Yes, Mom.”

“I’m allowed to be concerned. When you mess up over there, I get to have my best employee back.”

Ray had called Steve Cohen, his old boss at the Associated Press, hoping to maybe get a lead on how to try to work his way back into the business. Cohen had said, “Work your way back in? Are you kidding? Can you leave next week for the Durand Line?”

The Durand Line was the dangerous and porous border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

“Just like that?” Ray asked. “After all these years?”

“What did I always tell you, Ray? Good is good. You’re good. Really good. You’d be doing me a favor.”

Inside the terminal, Ray got on the line for the TSA security checkpoint. Two weeks ago, when Flair Hickory had first explained to him that he was going to get off for his past crime, Ray had shaken his head.

“It can’t be like that, Flair.”

“Like what?”

“I’ve run away enough,” Ray said. “I need to pay a price for what I did.”

Flair smiled and put his hand on Ray’s forearm and said, “You have paid a price. You’ve paid one for seventeen years.”

Maybe Flair was right. The images of blood hadn’t reappeared for a while. Ray wasn’t a hundred percent. He probably never would be. He still drank too much. But he was on his way.

Ray grabbed his carry-on off the conveyor belt and started for the gate. The departure board told him that he still had fifteen minutes until boarding. He sat by the gate and looked at his cell phone. He wanted to call Megan, let her know that he had found a job and would be okay, but he’d purposely lost her phone number, and even if he could remember it, which he could not, he wouldn’t call her. He’d think about it. He’d think about it a lot over the years. He’d even start dialing Megan’s number. But Ray would never let the call go through, and he’d never see Megan-Cassie-again.

Megan Pierce closed the Sub — Zero fridge and looked at her two children through the bay windows off the breakfast nook. Out in the backyard, Kaylie, her fifteen-year-old daughter, was picking on her younger brother, Jordan. Megan was tempted to open the window and tell Kaylie to stop for the umpteenth time. But today she just didn’t feel like it.

Siblings bicker. It’d be okay.

In the TV room, Dave was sprawled out in gray sweats with the remote in his hand.

“Kaylie has soccer practice,” she said.

“I’ll drive her.”

“I think she can get a ride home from Randi.”

“That would be helpful,” Dave said. “I can’t wait for her to get her license, so she can drive herself.”

“From what I hear, yes, you can.”

Dave sat up and smiled at her. She smiled back. He patted the seat next to him.

“Sit with me?” he asked.

“I got a million things to do.”

“Just for five minutes.”

Megan sat on the couch. Dave put his arm around her and pulled her closer. She snuggled in and rested her head on his chest. He flipped channels, as was his custom. She let him. The images passed by in quick flickers.

It wasn’t perfect, Megan knew. In the long run, it might not even be okay. But it was finally honest. She didn’t know where it would go, but right now, it all felt pretty good. She longed for the normalcy. She liked driving the car pools and making lunches and helping the kids with their homework and watching nothing on television with the man she loved. She hoped that the feeling would last, but history and the human condition told her otherwise. There would be restlessness again. There had to be. Grief, fear, passion, the darkest of secrets-nothing lasted forever. But maybe if she took a deep breath and held on, she could make this feeling stay with her, at least for a little while more.